Triggers

Rachel Cohen was fascinated by Orrin Gillett, the man she was linked to. A lawyer—and a rich one, at that. Certainly a good start! And he was handsome, too, if his own memories of his driver’s license and passport photos were anything to go by. Not that he thought of himself as handsome—but the photos showed a man who was: lots of light brown hair, a great face, and beautiful brown eyes behind round rimless glasses. Still, Rachel wanted to see for herself, and—

And another memory of his came to her, one of a black Secret Service agent with a shaved head coming to get him, and—yes, yes—and bringing him down here, and—

And the memory must be of only a minute or two ago, because here they came, coming down this corridor, and—

And Orrin Gillett was hot. She found herself saying an ebullient “Hi!” to him, like she was greeting an old friend—and, in a way, she supposed she was.

He looked at her, startled, but then smiled a terrific open-mouth smile at her. “Hello,” he said. “Nice day.” She had a strange feeling that his voice didn’t sound quite right—which, she suddenly realized, was the same feeling she had when she heard recordings of her own voice; he remembered his voice as he himself heard it, resonating in his sinus cavities. “Do I know you?” he added.

“No,” said Rachel. “But I know you.”

His tone was affable but baffled. “I don’t understand.”

Rachel nodded toward the door of the office Agent Dawson was using. “You will.”

Rachel knew she should get back to her desk, but work here had slowed to a crawl because most of the staff was still shell-shocked by the assassination attempt and the destruction of the White House; people were just sitting at their desks staring into space, or softly crying, or endlessly chatting to others, trying to make sense of it all.

Rather than heading down the corridor, Rachel instead took a seat in a little waiting alcove just past the room Agent Dawson was using. If her own experience was anything to judge by, Orrin Gillett would be coming out again in twenty minutes or so.

Whenever Rachel was considering doing business with a new company, she ran a simple test. She put the company name and the word “sucks” into Google. Every giant corporation had its detractors: “Microsoft sucks” yielded 285,000 hits, “FedEx sucks” produced 568,000, and “Disney sucks” served up a whopping two million pages. But for local businesses or obscure web companies, she’d found it a useful barometer.

Likewise, whenever she was interested in dating someone, she’d do a quick search on his name and the word “asshole”: “Devan Hooley asshole” had helped her dodge a major bullet!

But now, in this particular case, she had something even better than Google. There was no doubt that Orrin Gillett was attractive. And he seemed like a nice guy: he had a warm, friendly smile, and teeth that either hadn’t seen a lot of coffee, cola, or tobacco, or had been whitened, and—

And, yes, whitened. The Zoom! process, to be precise. Cost him six hundred bucks.

But he hadn’t been a smoker since high school, he didn’t like carbonated beverages, and his coffee intake was pretty average. But he had been treated with tetracycline as a kid, and it had left his teeth a pale tan, and he’d been self-conscious about it for years. And so he’d had the problem corrected.

Rachel thought about my girlfriend, but no memory came to her. And then—well, he was pretty buff, and impeccably dressed to boot!—she thought about my boyfriend. But the only memories that came were of her own exes, the most recent of which had left her life—or, at least, her bed—ten months ago.

And speaking of exes—ah.

Melinda.

And Valerie.

And Jennifer.

And Franca.

And Ann-Marie.

And that bitch Naomi.

She thought about them, but—

No, that wouldn’t work. She couldn’t think about them collectively; she had to pick one, and think about just her. Say, Valerie.

Ah. Blonde. Brown-eyed. Big-breasted. Rachel glanced down at her own chest: well, two out of three ain’t bad. And—oh, my! Our Val liked it a little rough, didn’t she? But…

But Orrin actually didn’t. He played it up that way, because Val asked him to, but—

Ah, in fact that was one of the reasons they’d broken up.

She tried another one. Jennifer.

Hmmm. Long straight hair, blue eyes, and…a very strong chin—

Oh my God! It was Jennifer Aniston! Orrin had dated Jennifer Aniston!

But no. That was crazy. Aniston lived in Los Angeles and she dated movie stars and—

Of course. Thinking about Jennifer now, her last name was Sinclair, not Aniston. But Rachel was conjuring up the only long-haired, blue-eyed Jennifer she herself knew, or knew of—and, of course, the character Jennifer Aniston was most famous for playing had also been named Rachel.

Jennifer and Orrin had dated for only a couple of months. And, at least as Orrin remembered it, they had parted on good terms—although he’d not heard from Ms. Sinclair since.